


the heart and the small change

by John the Alligator (Chyronic)



Series: observe and report [1]
Category: Twin Peaks, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Mentions of Character Death, Prompt Fill, Twin Peaks spoilers, despite being absolutely gen, don't have to know Twin Peaks, fire. definitely a lot of fire., for nightvalecommunitykink, i like Josie but if you don't like Josie that's okay, mentions of arson and human combustion, some thermodynamics?, this might not be the fic for you though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 07:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyronic/pseuds/John%20the%20Alligator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Josie knows she's dead, she should be dead, when she thinks about it. She seems to be older, by her hands, the feel of her face. Her bones hurt. </p><p>All things considered, she feels fine. </p><p>Some of the new streetlights seem to have haloes. She hitches a ride in a scratched red pickup like none she's ever seen. It throws off gold light, too. The boy driving doesn't seem to have noticed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the heart and the small change

**Author's Note:**

> For [this prompt](http://nightvalecommunitykink.dreamwidth.org/822.html?thread=21558#cmt21558): _Josie Packard eventually got out of that dresser drawer knob and wound up in Night Vale. Time paradoxes were involved, so she's a bit older than she should be, but after a few years spent in an atemporal limbo that stuff doesn't bother her very much. And she has so many new angel friends! Many of whom are both intrigued and alarmed by her talk of the Black Lodge._
> 
> I ran with it a bit differently, but, well. Thanks, OP. Thanks also to Lauren, my friend, sounding board, proofreader, arsonist, etc.

When the Great Northern Hotel burns down after the turn of the century, it is arson, depraved-heart murder, and manslaughter, and no one is charged. 

She is a soul in a drawer pull for twenty years, and then she isn't.

Later, after she's gone, there is a scandal.

#

She died of fright, which doesn't sound like enough of a reason. She died when her gun fell from her hands and Harry and the FBI agent burst into the hotel room and her heart was beating so fast she couldn't hear, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. Her heart pumped under her ears and then it stopped, and she fell, and the breath went out of her, and maybe something else did too.

Was she compressed in that drawer pull like a diamond? She had a couple diamond necklaces, they're supposed to be the hardest thing on Earth. She comes back to herself and she feels fragmented, both sharp-edged and like she's burning up at the seams.

She comes back to herself standing on the side of the road. She is wearing flat-soled shoes, and there's pain burning dully up her legs, down her arms. Everything feels both new to her and wrong.

There was a man behind her. There was a man.

Behind her—she turns, too quickly to keep her balance, doesn't fall, just barely—no light, she can't see anything. Below her, town. Moving lights.

When she stops holding her breath, exhales shakily, breathes in, she finds that she's breathing. Her heart beats slowly and quietly.

She trembles all the way down, but doesn't faint.

#

In more light, as she makes her way downhill, Josie's hands are strangely creased. She brings them up to her face; her skin is soft and doughy. The way it feels under her hands isn't her at all.

It takes her a little while, standing there, before she can start walking again. At the base of the mountain, Twin Peaks goes on. 

Her steps are slow and hesitant, on unfamiliar territory, in the dark. She doesn't know what she remembers. She is wearing a dress turned black in the moonlight that she does not believe she ever owned. 

Harry said he wanted to save her. He'd said he would take her away from here. 

She does remember his face when she died—when he burst into the room armed—when she had never seen him like that before—

She could've lived without seeing him like that at all. Now she's apparently living with it. 

When she gets into town she stops at what is no longer the Double R Diner. Her feet hurt. Her eyes hurt. The streetlights were replaced at some point—so this is not, with her skin no longer familiar to her and ashes on the soles of her shoes, just tomorrow that she woke up in. 

Josie knows she's dead, she should be dead, when she thinks about it. She seems to be older, by her hands, the feel of her face. Her bones hurt. 

All things considered, she feels fine. 

Some of the new streetlights seem to have haloes. She hitches a ride in a scratched red pickup like none she's ever seen. It throws off gold light, too. The boy driving doesn't seem to have noticed.

#

She carries the fear in her throat still; when she speaks, she speaks softly, for all that she wants to start screaming. She tells the boy in the pickup truck she'll say when her destination comes up, and keeps looking behind them.

After long enough on the road—two lanes, nothing visible outside the headlights and the warm aura still surrounding the car—for all that she is still almost frozen with terror like a second skeleton, she falls asleep.

When she wakes up, it's sudden, and once she stops shaking the sunlight is bright, the car's halo almost invisible on the highway. The young man tells her he stopped for breakfast, and is she all right. She didn't ask for his name and it hasn't occurred to her to want it. She says she can't pay him. Her voice doesn't break.

He shrugs, still looking at the road, and after a moment of blind searching he hands her a sandwich.

Where did she say she was going, he asks, eyes more distant than they ought to be, both hands back on the wheel.

She'll know it when she sees it, Josie says. She keeps one eye on the rear-view mirror, even though her reflection is in it.

"Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear," it informs her.

And she is old.

#

She startles awake again as they roll over a speedbump without slowing down. The young man is still staring straight ahead, which is good, because the road ahead lurches to one side and then another, and they are apparently coming down a mountain. Josie knows mountains, but it's still a bit of a shock. Spread out in front of and below them is the car's halo, steady, reassuring, and further in the distance, flickering human life; the sun's about to set.

The radio sputters on as they roll into the city.

"What is power? Who has it? Why do they have it? Do you have it? If you seek power, can you keep it? Can you hold it in your hand? Is it something you can only pursue, but never catch? Welcome to Night Vale." 

She tells the young man that he can drop her off at the first convenience store she spots on the way into town. He nods and mumbles something with his eyes still fixed in the distance. When she watches him pull away from the curb his pickup truck meanders all over the road.

The store is selling, according to a sign on the register apparently written in caligraphic brush, "Lavender gum $1 — Advice and counsel — ALL ELSE NOT FOR SALE BY ORDERS OF THE MANAGEMENT". The girl behind the counter smiles apologetically. 

"Excuse me," Josie says, unsure of what she's going to ask, "w—"

"That's counsel if it's a question, and advice and counsel are one of our two fine products we have on offer today." It sounds learned by rote, and she doesn't look very happy about having done so. Belatedly: "Ma'am."

"Can I owe you for... 'counsel'?" This if nothing else is familiar; the way her voice drags along a question, the particular feeling behind her eyes when she needs to be pitiable, trustworthy, a lost girl or a wallflower. She does seem, however, to be out of her depth.

"Sure," the girl says, and leans against the register. "How can I help you, ma'am?"

She can't exactly ask what happened to her. If it's somehow answered, Josie's brief brushes with the unknown and unknowable have convinced her—in her throat, in her jaw, in the breathlessness she feels as soon as she thinks of asking who she is and how she got here—that she wouldn't be able to believe any answer she received by the simple fact that it ever made it to her ears. "Where am I?" 

"You're in Night Vale, ma'am, and we wish you the very best insofar as it is possible, reasonable, and Council-approved." 

The name doesn't mean anything the second time she hears it, either. Maybe it shows on her face.

"Listen—ma'am—you didn't ask how much you'd owe and you don't know where you are. Please don't take this the wrong way, but do you need somewhere to stay?"

#

Last week James Hickson burnt to death in the street, by the community college. Not in the middle of the street, but a bit to the side. Apparently, this matters. No bystanders were harmed; May, the girl from the convenience store, who locked up behind them even though it was barely six in the evening, says that was remarkably polite of him. Also remarkably polite of him: he left his house unoccupied, and has no family. May just has to check, she says, but they should be sorted.

Josie thinks that everyone has a family, the difference being whether or not they're alive or interested, but doesn't say anything. May stands up straighter on the sidewalk than behind the counter, and speaks more surely as she leads Josie into town. "I can sort this out," she says, "don't you worry, ma'am, having outsiders come in is exciting, this is great."

She told Josie—repeatedly—to stay behind, and ducked through a door off the street Josie didn't see before she opened it. Long enough passes that Josie turns to look at the gently undulating road, the mountains in the distance, the small, bright light that might be the young man who brought her here having passed through, and then May is beside her, grinning.

"Everything's fine! It's neat," May tells Josie, brightly, the setting sun in her eyes. "He died and now you're going to live here! So it was for you in the first place, really. He wasn't even here long. I think you'll do just fine, ma'am."

Josie feels a quiet, proprietary kind of sick guilt. If she were a good person, she'd voice it, probably. "Why me?" is the kind of thing Harry would say, or "How did he die, really? Is there anything I can do?"

She could say something. She has plenty of time to say something, May leading her through town, stopping to tell anyone she sees that this is Josie (did Josie ever give her her name? She must have), she's just moving in, got into town this evening.

There's plenty of time, before they get there. The house is small, and lonely, out in the blank desert with only a trailer park within sight, with no lights in the windows as the last of the sun goes down. The sunset seemed to last a long time.

She could still say something. Instead, she pushes the door open. It's unlocked.

The dead man has left her a radio.

#

Houses in Night Vale pass through hands this way more often than not, it turns out. For the unmarried, the childless, those without someone who would stake a claim on where they ate and slept and breathed, post-mortem hospitality is a tradition. So it raises no eyebrows, when she starts baking for the town market—the one that does allow civillians, and all in all makes itself a better façade for the apparently obligatory shady operations that run it by doing so—and people friendly or brave enough to ask make small talk by wondering where she's staying, that it's James Hickson's old place until it isn't.

And then it isn't.

"Multiple listeners have reported what appeared to be a massive lightning strike on Old Woman Josie's house last night," the radio informs her one morning after she loses count of the weeks that turned into months. "There was no subsequent thunder. While in the instant after the reportedly 'blinding white and beautiful' light had disappeared and our citizen reporters were blinking spots out of their eyes her house appeared to stand completely unchanged in the renewed darkness and silence, we at Night Vale Community Radio would like to take this opportunity to wish her the best of luck, should it be needed."

This is news to her in all respects. She slept soundly and uneventfully. She heads into town for groceries a day before she needs to, though, in case... in case. In case anyone had worried, she supposes, later. Apparently they did.

If she has been Josie Packard, Miss Josie, oh _Josie_ , Maid Josie, the-wine-now-Josie, never Josie Eckhart but only by luck, and anyone could say she's his, hers, and the other's, why not, if Josie wasn't the name on her first birth certificate of several but no one's counting—

Being Old Woman Josie of Night Vale isn't any hardship. She'll take it.

#

Josie doesn't take her metamorphasis very badly, all things considered. It is inconvenient, being old. Things hurt. She takes a while getting used to seeing herself in mirrors, but if it's a couple years then no one's counting. If she missed her looks it would only be for what they could accomplish, she could swear under oath, and when she was always working on somebody else's terms it turns out she can in fact stand it. If she's lost her taste for fancy clothes anyone could understand why.

Her hair is white. She will never get used to that. She liked her hair.

She's had a good fifty years of her life scooped out of the middle, but it's not like her life had been worth that much beforehand. She lives for herself, for a while, quietly, and only realises that she'd been holding her breath for that novelty to end when the first two angels knock on her front door. 

They are ten feet tall and covered in eyes that blink rapidly when she only looks them up and down and says they can come in. One looks like her sister might have, if her sister were ten feet tall, covered in eyes, and alive; if she had a sister. The other is black. They cast light in a way she's never seen before, it wipes out shadows and throws every inch of her house into strange and bright relief. It doesn't hurt her eyes at all, though, which is more than can be said for the summer sun. 

They say their names are Erika.

All right, Josie says, I'm Josie. There's a lightbulb that needs changing on the porch, if you would be kind. Would you like anything to drink?

Just salt water, Erika says. There is a pause. 

She translates, later, in her head, reconciles what just happened into a story she can put into words and remember. She suspects that Erika and Erika did not actually speak to her, not out loud, and that she forgot more than they told her in the first place. Her memory becomes a simplification she can use, going forward, just like it always has been.

Erika tells her, with a sort of fixed solemnity that reminds her of no one at all, that a human soul could be seen as the entire process of being human; that being human requires a great deal of energy, over time; that a fire requires a great deal more energy, over less time; that life, if one only considers matter, is a net loss; that Josie's dead body was lighter than that of a child caught in an intersection; that this is secret, and Josie is not meant to go around sharing secrets, but that she's been doing a good job of that anyway, and that the angels trust her, and they thought she ought to know.

I wondered, Josie says; she did.

She has a further purpose, Erika says, smallest pair of wings fluttering gently from jaw to cheekbone to brow.

I had a feeling, Josie says. She didn't.

#

She finds out that anyone who isn't her isn't actually meant to look Erika, or any of the others, in the eyes. Any of the eyes. That is why they have so many wings, Erika tells her; when things are difficult they are at least made to make sense. Anything else would be cruel.

She is sick of fire, of snow, and of being threatened. She is sick of shadows. Her house doesn't light up when Erika, an Erika, walks into it any more. It's constantly illuminated instead, in solid yellow that's started seeping out into the desert. Somehow she sleeps fine anyway.

The City Council comes to see her about the angels, three of them do. They speak in unison, and hide their faces. As an outsider, she is told, not only has her ability to conceive of angels been formally revoked, she was never afforded it in the first place.

Erika and Erika, and the others, are inside the house, behind her. The light from her house falls on the City Council's feet, on their neat and dustless shoes, and no further.

There is great evil in the world, the angels have told her, but not without intent, and not without reason. She can see no reason, but her eyesight has been failing her these days.

Josie says, very quietly, that there seem to be angels whether or not she is legally permitted to believe in them, and that they are her guests. She says, she believes in hospitality. Her voice is steady, and she does not look behind her, and she says, please explain exactly what you want me to do, here. I don't think you understand.

What amazes her is this: alone among anyone else she's been, Old Woman Josie would be missed. Not mourned, avenged, or investigated, which is about the living. Missed. There are people she matters to, no blood or money needed, and the angels taking off her back porch into the air for purposes and destinations unknown are better than fireworks.

She stays outside to watch, after the Council leaves.

**Author's Note:**

>  _And though the shadows in waiting are wasting their time_  
>  _'Cause my veins are tracking streetlamps_  
>  _And the compass and the stones_  
>  _And I'm still making my junk creatures out of rags and bones_  
>  _Oh yeah, the hammer and the nail_  
>  _Oh yeah, the heart's in the small change_  
>  _Oh yeah, and the Devil's in the details_  
>  _And in my rags and bones_  
>  —Thea Gilmore, "Rags and Bones"


End file.
